Haiti

  Geffrard’s attempt to reassure foreign observers largely backfired, however. Instead of proving to outsiders that Haiti was free from “superstition,” the Bizoton prosecutions were repeatedly cited as evidence that the country in fact harbored practitioners of ritual cannibalism. In his book, Spenser St. John was clearly eager to paint Haiti as a land of barbarism and savagery: he included a chapter titled “Vaudoux-Worship and Cannibalism” and then, just for good measure, followed it with another specifically titled “Cannibalism.” (He did allow that there was a split in Vodou between those who only sacrificed animals and others, a minority, who practiced human sacrifice.) Though he hadn’t personally witnessed the kinds of ceremonies he accused Haitians of practicing, St. John had clearly been welcomed into several Vodou temples, which didn’t seem particularly menacing: he described one as a “spacious” place “papered with engravings from the Illustrated London News” and “pictures of the Virgin Mary and various saints.” Still, despite the relative openness of various Haitian hosts, he seemed quite certain that at its heart, Vodou was somehow deeply sinister.54

  Without any firsthand experience of rituals to draw on, the best St. John could do was to rehash a detailed description of a ceremony provided by Moreau de Saint-Méry in 1796 and insist that religious practices had remained essentially unchanged since then. He also located two supposed eyewitness accounts of child sacrifice—one by a French priest, another by a U.S. visitor who claimed to have been initiated into the secrets of Vodou by Dominican friends. Both writers described sneaking into ceremonies disguised in blackface, and both said that they saw a child being sacrificed and tried, unsuccessfully, to stop the proceedings.55

  Such accounts were titillating, but a little too easy to dismiss as embellishments or full-out invention. In the trial at Bizoton, however, St. John felt he had found undeniable proof that cannibalism was rampant in the country. Though he complimented Geffrard on his efforts, St. John declared that the trial had done little to stop the practice of human sacrifice. “People are killed and their flesh sold at the market; children are stolen to furnish the repasts of cannibals; bodies are dug from their graves to serve as food, and the Vaudoux reign triumphant,” he announced. No important holiday passed, he claimed, without child sacrifice. These dramatic claims helped to make St. John’s book into a bestseller, and his success attracted numerous imitators. In 1891, one writer admitted that he had never actually seen a Vodou ceremony, but he nevertheless described the religion’s rituals in vivid detail—complete with Vodou practitioners “throwing themselves on the victims, tearing them apart with their teeth and avidly sucking the blood that boils from their veins.” Each day, he wrote, forty Haitians were eaten, and almost every citizen in the country had tasted human flesh. Such writings multiplied throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shaping the way that Haiti was perceived throughout Europe and the United States.56

  As they watched increasing numbers of outsiders arrive in their country, meanwhile, some rural Haitians similarly saw them as carriers of an old but vividly remembered barbarism. Wandering near the ruins of the Sans-Souci palace in the 1870s, for example, the U.S. traveler Samuel Hazard found that many Haitians harbored hostility toward his countrymen. “Why do you dislike the Americans so much?” he asked. The invariable answer was that “the Americans wanted to come and take their lands and make them slaves.” Hazard did his best to be reassuring: the Haitians, he said, had nothing to fear from the United States, which had freed its slaves and was generously educating them. Of course, his Haitian interlocutors might have felt some reasonable suspicion at the lateness of the American conversion to the cause of emancipation, which they themselves had fought for three-quarters of a century before. But more importantly, Hazard’s literal interpretation of the threat of a return to slavery also missed the point. In Haiti, the colonial past served as a metaphor, a specter of forced labor and external control. Taken in this way, the Haitians’ perspective on U.S. intentions was in fact quite clear-eyed. The long-desired recognition of Haiti by the United States opened the way for more and more American involvement in Haiti and its political life. During the coming decades, U.S. corporations and banks would gain an increasing foothold in Haiti, and in their wake would come U.S. marines. In the end, the fear of the return of a certain kind of slavery turned out to be perfectly justified.57

  5

  LOOKING NORTH

  “Will Haiti work?” an anxious Anténor Firmin wondered in 1905. One of Haiti’s most celebrated intellectuals and statesmen, Firmin had spent his life grappling with three demons: European racism, U.S. expansionism, and Haitian authoritarianism. Now, living in political exile at the twilight of his career, he wrote a book comparing Haiti’s history to that of the United States and evaluating the possible benefits and threats to Haiti from its northern neighbor. The United States was now the most powerful political force in the region, Firmin advised his countrymen, and Haiti had to find a way to deal with it.1

  Firmin did not think that Haiti should give itself over completely to U.S. influence. He brushed off, for instance, the notion that Haitians should abandon French and turn to English as the main language of their country—an idea first proposed by Christophe in the 1810s and echoed by some Haitian intellectuals in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, however, Firmin distanced himself from those who considered the United States a profound danger to Haitian sovereignty. Instead of “getting caught up in an irrational suspicion,” he wrote, Haitians should instead “study the question with history books in their hands.” Among foreign powers, he argued, the United States was the one that had shown itself “most respectful of their rights as an independent people.” Firmin was well aware that the United States had been the last power to officially recognize Haiti’s independence, but during the decades of his active political life he had seen more British and German gunships than American ones brazenly intervene in Haitian affairs. More importantly, Firmin had an idealistic conviction that the United States would always remain true to its founding principles and therefore respect the independence of other countries. In any case, he added as if to reassure himself, the United States didn’t need Haiti. Of all the great “occidental powers,” they had the lowest population density—fewer than twenty-five people per square mile—and therefore the least need for colonies.2

  The key for Haiti, Firmin wrote, was to figure out how to thrive under the “colossal shadow” cast by the United States—how to “grow, develop, without ever letting itself be absorbed.” In this task, he thought, Haiti could count on help from the Americans themselves. It was in the United States’ best interest to make sure that Haiti “strengthened and civilized itself,” so that European powers would no longer “molest” the country. In the long run, the United States might even become Haiti’s savior, providing what the country needed to become “an active and laborious civilization.” The Americans “have capital of all kinds,” Firmin noted: “money, machines, experience of hard work, and the moral energy necessary to confront difficult circumstances.” They could “offer us that helping hand we have been looking for throughout the past century.”3

  Firmin also thought that the United States could serve as an institutional example. The alternation of parties in power, he wrote, guaranteed political stability. He effused that of all the countries in the world, the U.S. social and political system combined liberty and equality in the most successful fashion. American citizens, he argued, put the national good over individual ambitions. Firmin even downplayed the continuing racial discrimination in the United States. He celebrated Lincoln, and while he admitted that African Americans had yet to secure full rights, he predicted confidently that the problem would be fully resolved within a century. Going further, he asserted that the United States could actually provide a model of racial egalitarianism for Haiti, which suffered from its own conflicts between mulattoes and blacks.4

  For all its optimism, though, Firmin’s analysis also carried a note
of caution. With such a dominant neighbor, Haitians urgently had to solve their own problems; otherwise they would be inviting disaster, opening the way for the violation and destruction of their precious sovereignty. The power of the United States, its “almost undisputed preponderance” in the hemisphere, was inescapable, he wrote, and Haiti needed to act accordingly. “Instead of putting ourselves in the position of trying to block an impetuous and irresistible torrent,” Haiti had to allow itself to be “productively watered” by the flood of U.S. power. Otherwise, Firmin warned, “we’ll be carried away trying to block it, in a gesture as reckless as it is hopeless.”5

  * * *

  Growing up in Le Cap in the 1860s, Firmin got an early education in the vagaries and violence of Haitian politics. He was nine years old when Soulouque was overthrown by Geffrard, and within a few years insurgents had in turn risen up against the new president. Among them was a prominent officer named Sylvain Salnave, who set up his headquarters in Le Cap. Fighting to remain in power, Geffrard secured military support from the British, and in 1865, British warships bombarded Le Cap on two occasions, targeting its public buildings and reducing its forts to rubble.6

  Salnave, for his part, sought assistance from the United States, hoping that U.S. warships would help him blockade Port-au-Prince. “Since we are an American nation like the United States,” his officers wrote in an appeal for aid, “we wish to unite ourselves in a close bond of political and commercial friendship with your government.” With U.S. military assistance, Salnave explained, he could overthrow Geffrard. Then, once he won, he would be in a position to offer the United States special military and commercial privileges. Most significantly, Salnave was prepared to provide access to a spectacular naval station in Haiti: the port of Môle Saint-Nicolas.7

  The Môle sits astride a beautiful and protected bay on Haiti’s northwestern tip, directly across from Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. Dubbed the “Gibraltar of the West Indies,” it was described by a British officer in the late eighteenth century as the best harbor he had ever seen—perhaps the best “in the world,” and one that could shelter any European navy. Salnave knew that the United States, which had made frequent use of a coaling station set up at Le Cap during the Civil War, needed such ports. But he overestimated the American government’s interest at the time. His offer was rejected. “We have no purposes or designs of acquisition or aggrandizement within the territory of Hayti,” wrote the U.S. secretary of state.8

  Even without U.S. aid, Salnave garnered enough support within Haiti to establish himself as president in 1867. But his rule was short-lived. In 1869, his opponents invaded Port-au-Prince and attacked the National Palace. Salnave had turned it into an armory, packing it with guns and ammunition, and when the shelling started, the palace exploded. It was a fitting symbol for Haiti’s political situation, as competing groups appeared ready to sacrifice nearly everything for control of the state, even the state itself.9

  The second half of the nineteenth century was a time of seemingly constant civil war in Haiti. Between 1843 and 1889, there were twelve presidents and nearly as many constitutions: eight in all, along with several constitutional amendments. Almost always, the changes in government came as the result of a military campaign in which the president was ousted by a rebel at the head of a regional army. The new constitutions, as historian Claude Moïse points out, were never the “result of a national consensus,” or even of “agreement among the ruling classes.” Instead, they were largely tools used to maintain control of the state and to divide up the spoils that came with it. The discussions surrounding each new constitution focused primarily on just one question: how much power the president would have within the system.10

  And yet Haiti enjoyed an oddly stable form of instability. While control of the national government in Port-au-Prince constantly shifted as the result of civil war, the local political structures in most of Haiti’s regions remained largely unchanged. The military commanders of each district ran the local governments and managed much of the administration of people’s daily lives—policing communities, overseeing taxation, and distributing government resources. Though there were certainly other influential groups, especially in the towns—merchants, journalists, professionals—local power remained in the hands of military leaders. And although the district commanders were sometimes replaced when a new government came to power in Port-au-Prince, many stayed in their positions for years, even decades, providing a certain continuity despite the frequent changes in leadership on the national level.

  In a district outside Croix-des-Bouquets, for instance, an officer named Caliska Calice held sway for nearly four decades. A French merchant who visited him around 1904 wrote that Calice had used his influence to “assure calm” in his district on behalf of the many national governments that had succeeded each other over the decades. He had a comfortable life: he greeted his visitor wearing a pink bathrobe decorated with red flowers and showed him around his property, which included a large garden producing corn, manioc, and potatoes, surrounded by large and productive palm trees. There were several buildings organized around a courtyard, where Calice acted as a judge for local conflicts, hosted dances and cockfights, and dispensed medical and psychiatric help to those who needed it.11

  The Haitian army, thus, was used not so much to defend the country as to run it. Military service remained the primary route to social advancement, especially because officers got not only a salary but also often local power and access to land. Over time, the army became both bloated and top-heavy. Each new president brought to power by insurrection incorporated a new group of officers into his regime, and they often stayed on even after their benefactors were overthrown. “The only thing left to do,” one president quipped, was to “issue a decree making everyone a general.” In 1867 there were about 20,000 soldiers in Haiti (in a population of 700,000 or so), and of these, a startling 13,500 were officers.12

  The military was far from unified or centrally controlled. The civil wars often pitted army divisions from different regions against the president in Port-au-Prince. Though the insurgencies frequently involved a patchwork of groups, they generally coalesced either in the north of the country or in the southern peninsula—regions that operated with considerable economic autonomy. Indeed, nineteenth-century Haiti can best be described as a confederation of eleven largely independent regions, each with its own port town, merchant elites, landowners, and market system. The regions specialized in the production of different crops, with the north focused largely on coffee and dyewood exports, for instance, while some plains in the south concentrated on growing cane for the production of rum and for local sugar consumption. Port-au-Prince was one of the larger ports, of course, and as the center of the government it occupied a unique role in this broader matrix. But it was not the dominant economic and political center that it would become in the twentieth century. Le Cap essentially functioned as an alternative capital, with a thriving economic life. Many residents in the north resented the central government in Port-au-Prince, as did their counterparts in the south, nursing grievances that could easily fuel uprisings against the state.13

  Direct popular participation in Haiti’s political institutions, meanwhile, remained quite limited. Theoretically, nineteenth-century constitutions granted the right to vote to most Haitian men over the age of twenty-one. But for reasons that remain unclear, theory and practice diverged substantially, and even in urban areas, very few people voted. In Port-au-Prince in 1870, only nine hundred men were registered to vote. By 1888 the situation had improved somewhat, but nevertheless, of fifty thousand residents of Port-au-Prince, only four thousand were registered, and no more than eight hundred actually voted. In smaller towns and in the countryside, voting was even rarer, and elections were often manipulated by local officers. The majority of Haitians were thus almost totally excluded from the political process.14

  Insurrection, on the other hand, was open to all. Regional leaders who wanted to overthrow the central reg
ime gathered followers from among the general population, taking advantage of the fact that Haitians on the whole were well armed and many had experience in military conflicts. Most of these leaders presented themselves as populists, making vague promises about a more equitable distribution of land and money. But while each new regime created some turnover within the ruling class, little changed in the broader structures of power. Most of the political promises made by insurrectionary leaders were never fulfilled, setting the stage for a continuing cycle of uprisings.15

  The constant threat of insurrection in turn shaped government action. Once they gained power, even leaders who saw themselves as liberal reformers and decried the repressive nature of the previous government quickly became convinced that they could survive only by eliminating their enemies. They responded harshly to all forms of opposition, even those channeled through parliamentary means, seeing disagreement as a threat to national governance rather than a constitutive part of it. With a new uprising threatening Port-au-Prince every few years, political leaders could nearly always claim that the security of the government was in danger and on that basis justify almost anything. Indeed, Haitian president Lysius Salomon, who ruled from 1879 to 1888, admitted with striking candor: “I like coups d’état. You can’t govern without them.” The trick to ruling, he went on, was to “take as much advantage as possible” of a crisis—whatever its provenance—in order to justify a stranglehold on executive power. In 1908, one Haitian observer wrote that governments resided in the National Palace as if they were “camped in enemy country,” always ready to carry out “extreme measures” against their own citizens like an occupying army.16